Jet Lag and Z
When I first quit my home town,
home country, for ‘overseas’ -
thrilled, I took the plane -
no-one warned me about jet lag.
The previous year they’d gone by sea,
departing friends - it was the great
transition, ’63,
from voyage to flight -
I’d envied their going (even
the fabled sea-sickness),
their slow weeks afloat,
Equator jollifications,
long books, the mystique
of canals, Suez or Panama -
the ‘northern hemisphere’,
powerful idea.
I flew in to cold Heathrow,
coped with bulging luggage
on the Tube to South Ken's
unfriendliest concierge,
took a walk to Hyde Park
glancing at monuments -
soaring? - overbearing;
collapsing on the grass,
tremulous, delirious.
Jet-lagged, though I didn’t
know it, body clock
totally out of whack.
I’d bought my first
London paper - turning
its pages, I learned
what power over the new
New Zealand expatriate
had the letter Z (zed not zee).
The wandering eye’s fate
is to be drawn magnetically
to any and every Z
on any printed page.
They leaped to view
as if to show
home was not out of touch,
remote but not too much.
Thus I focused disappointed
for mere moments on Zoo, Zone,
Zanzibar, Zambia,
anything that zigzagged.
This survived being jet-lagged,
stronger than the national flag.
What is my nation? -
perish any patriotism.
This is primal - like the outline
on maps of those two islands
pored over in primary school,
traced and internalized.
To this day, especially
when travelling, dislocated,
decentred, deracinated,
I jump to attention
fixated on what in my need
reaches out to the letter Z.
Max in Seattle, October 2014
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